


Be Careful What You Wish For

by deedeejadexo



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Angst, Attraction, Canon Universe, Courtship, Dark, Dark Will Graham, Emotional Manipulation, Friendship, Gen, Love Confessions, M/M, Manipulative Hannibal, Mind Games, Murder, Murder Husbands, One Shot, Self-Acceptance, Short One Shot, Somewhere amid Season Two, two sides of the same coin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-20
Updated: 2018-03-20
Packaged: 2019-04-05 07:34:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14039316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deedeejadexo/pseuds/deedeejadexo
Summary: After re-watching the Hannibal series and not being able to help myself, I wrote this. Just a short one shot that I hope encompasses their relationship throughout the show and what they're thinking as they side step one another through their manipulative dance of destruction, evolution and eventual becoming.





	Be Careful What You Wish For

He’s sat in what he’s come to think of as _his_ seat in Hannibal Lecter’s office, back reclined and head lifted stubbornly, fevered sweetness of the – thanks to Wills newly prescribed medication – receding encephalitis radiating from his small quaking frame and drifting over towards the other man sat opposite him.

“Why?” Will breathes, lips twitching into a self effacing half snarl. “After everything... Why do you still insist on _helping_ me?”

Hannibal, to his credit, doesn’t even pretend to not know what Will is referring to this time. His role in guiding him into his becoming, subconsciously, or even sometimes quite consciously, helping, as Will put it, him through the darkness and through to the other side, stability and total awareness of his true self awaiting him.

He doesn’t dishonour or bore Will with the arrogant cruelty of feigning ignorance, as he has in the very close past. Instead, he keeps the gaze of his younger once friend, his selfishly best and favourite design, expression closed and lacking all emotion. Only his eyes heating slightly in their growing darkness, holding with them an intensity such that Will couldn’t look away if he tried.

“Why does a sculptor sculpt? Because he sees a lump of clay, and decides he can turn it into something he considers beautiful.”

It’s as close to an omission wrapped in an admission of participation, manipulation and coercion that Will finds he’s been waiting for, _needing_ to hear, as he’s ever going to get, he realises with startling clarity, deep sea cobalt eyes falling closed with a shaky exhale.

And rather than fill him with the relief he’d been expecting to feel, it only fills him with a gnawing truth he’s been burying deep and ignoring for the deepest time unknown to him, seemingly forever.

Rather than lose himself in the emotion threatening to override him, drowning him in the deepest of waves, he latches on to the subtext of what Hannibal had just vocalised. As always, the detail lay in what he alluded and chose not to say.

Woven and spoken softly with modest certainty, Will blinks and calms the tides within him at hearing them spoken in such a way. He opens his eyes and stares across from his seated position in front of the psychiatrist before him, blue emerald orbs greedily taking in the only one single thing he can rely on to be real and grounding him at this present moment, despite all else and everything.

The criminal with an artistic sense of art in death, the cannibal with a taste for the refined, his colleague over the years in finding and capturing the less deserved mortals of morality, and finally, above all this, his friend.

They are intertwined, minds closing and linking into shortly becoming one. Will feels no shame in this, his empathy delving into Hannibal’s mind, unknowingly having been doing so for far much longer than he’d likely care to admit. Only residing horror, not at The Chesapeake Ripper’s, Hannibal’s, _their_ , crimes and atrocities, but at the thought that really, harbouring and labouring under these pretences, it didn’t seem to bother him that he wasn’t as bothered as he thought he ought to and should be.

He quite purely and basically understood Hannibal, could see his point of view with shocking reality and clarity. And lately, he’s been feeling the stirrings of interest, even compassion, the terrifying emotion he usually got along with such thoughts and feelings growing dimmer and harder to cling onto.

Talk about desensitising, let alone dissociating.

Will’s lips twitch upwards in the slightest bit of humour, palms scrabbling at the arm rests beneath his forearms for strength and purchase he hopes he’ll find there. Because he finally sees Hannibal, and Hannibal, he sees _him_. He sees the thoughts that keep Will up at night, sees the hate and hunger that drives him, grows in him, conflicts him, the edge of his choices, his identity. He sees the true horrors in his minds eye, shares some, if not most of them, in fact.

But above all, he sees him, all of him, and he accepts him, prepared with the eventuality that he’d not be seen back. Or worse, seen openly and so completely then only to be rejected. Even before he had changed him, ‘sculpted’ him. Time and time again, he has shown Will this. And the reluctance to fight the eroding abyss, to simply let nature take its course. And it was becoming clear that he prepared that to be an acceptable and foreseeable outcome. Will realised this, it all fitting into place. And something tugged and ached in his chest that he wasn’t quite ready to analyse just yet.

Instead, he enquiries, eyes squinting a fraction and head tilting slightly to the right, curious, small growing grin bordering flirtatious.

“Do you consider me beautiful yet, doctor Lecter?”

Hannibal doesn’t hesitate. The barest faint twitch of his lips being the only movement he makes in appreciation of Wills words as he replies with honest sensitivity and effortless simplicity, hands folding together neatly over his crossed legs.

“Often,” he recounts, summarising with undoubted certain correction, “always.”

**Author's Note:**

> So, was re-watching the Hannibal series and in all honestly, just couldn't help myself. I wanted to write something, lol. This is my first delve into the Hannibal fandom, let me know what you think? All criticism welcome, :) would love to know what your thoughts are and if you liked it and how to improve!


End file.
